Calvin & Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Gives Rare Interview

Image: Bill Watterson

The infamously reclusive creator of Calvin & Hobbes, Bill Watterson, spoke for the first time in several years in a new interview at Mental Floss. Watterson, whose art will soon appear in an exhibit at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum with work from Cul de Sac creator Richard Thompson, discussed his feelings on the world of digital comics, creators’ rights, and how he almost lost Calvin & Hobbes.

Asked where he thinks Calvin & Hobbes fits into today’s comics landscape, which includes not only print comics but webcomics and digital comics, Watterson replies:

Personally, I like paper and ink better than glowing pixels, but to each his own. Obviously the role of comics is changing very fast. On the one hand, I don’t think comics have ever been more widely accepted or taken as seriously as they are now. On the other hand, the mass media is disintegrating, and audiences are atomizing. I suspect comics will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money. I’m old enough to find all this unsettling, but the world moves on. All the new media will inevitably change the look, function, and maybe even the purpose of comics, but comics are vibrant and versatile, so I think they’ll continue to find relevance one way or another. But they definitely won’t be the same as what I grew up with.

He also discussed his battle for more room and flexibility on the comics page at a time when that real estate was shrinking, a battle that he famously won. It was a riskier proposition than many may realize; after signing most of his rights away to get syndicated, Watterson said he had no legal rights to demand anything, and could have even lost Calvin & Hobbes itself. “I could not take the strip with me if I quit, or even prevent the syndicate from replacing me, so I was truly scared I was going to lose everything I cared about either way… It was a grim, sad time.”

While the notion of Bill Watterson being replaced by anyone on Calvin & Hobbes is blasphemy to fans of the strip, the experience he describes offers an interesting contrast to the landscape of comics today, where it’s far easier for webcartoonists with a wide variety of styles and stories to find their own niche audience without the help of a syndicate. But as Watterson notes, this can also atomize the audience from national to niche, while the comics pages of newspapers are still shrinking (and newspapers aren’t faring so well themselves).

This long tail of comics may allow creators more diversity and more control, but Watterson worries that without mass media distribution comics “will have less widespread cultural impact and make a lot less money” — that it will be difficult to create more comics like Calvin & Hobbes, which become cultural touchstones because they are read by all, not merely a small, devoted audience.

A fuller version of the interview will be published in the December issue of Mental Floss magazine.